


Whirligig

by Scribe



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 19:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Geoffrey, Kate, ways in which Hamlet is a love story, and being haunted (sometimes literally) by the past. Set during Season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whirligig

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nina (ninamazing)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninamazing/gifts).



> This would be have been a disaster without my betas, fiercynn and petra.

**Geoffrey: Five (the epilogue)**

"Is there anything better than this?" she says, eyes alight with the memory of curtain call, and Geoffrey knows that whatever it was they had is over. Come next season he'll offer her Juliet; he'll probably be helpless not to. It's maybe even odds that she'll take it, but he has his own memories of the rush of euphoria she's feeling, and as he watches her run to Jack he expects that he'll be turned down.

Because it's over, because it's a sadness but also a relief that maybe he can wrench his life away from the echoes of his breakdown, he takes for himself one moment. He lets himself love her, simply, free from Ophelia's shadow, nothing more or less than a young actress coming into her own, one who might count herself his friend. One moment, and then he walks away.

"That little shit," says Ellen, older now, the indignation mostly- but only mostly- good humored. "She was better than me."

Outside this room Kate is in Jack's arms and here and now and possibly forever Ellen is caught as deep in his heart as she has always, always been.

"Who?" asks Geoffrey, and he means it completely.

**Kate: One (the beginning)**

  
The part of the story she doesn't often share is that Geoffrey's Hamlet was the first person she was ever attracted to.

Jack's Hamlet is traditional, when it comes down to it, brooding and tormented. Geoffrey's had been all breathtaking charisma and desperate energy, a man you could truly believe had once been the people's prince, a force of nature suddenly rendered helpless.

Sitting in the audience, she'd thought her heart was going to pound its way out of her chest during the first break in that intensity: an embrace in the nunnery scene, suspended and honest, Hamlet and Ophelia clinging to each other before he pushed her away again. She relived it every night for weeks, too young yet to know where she wanted the fantasy to go, hovering unsatisfied over the thought of Geoffrey sweeping her up, strong and unstoppable.

Kate, twelve, thought she loved him. It was the one thing she kept secret, knowing it would be misinterpreted. She knew that her new passion for acting wasn't because of a crush, but that didn't mean that it wasn't because of Geoffrey, and she wasn't sure she could explain the difference well enough to make someone else understand.

  
**Geoffrey: Four**

  
Jack is twenty minutes late, which is unusual for him; despite- or perhaps because of- his Hollywood reputation, he usually makes every effort to be professional. Geoffrey paces in the very back of the house, hoping to have this conversation uninterrupted.

"I am not you!" he growls.

"Evidently not." Oliver is perched on an aisle railing, unperturbed. "At least I made it to opening night."

"That's your argument? That your Hamlet _opened_?"

"You kissed her, didn't you?" says Oliver, nastily. "You _like_ her."

"That is nothing like you and Ellen."

"Obviously."

Geoffrey glares, unsure if he's being sarcastic. Oliver puts his hands in the air.

"Oh, no, of course, you're right. I'm sure he's just stuck in traffic. In New Burbage."

That's definitely sarcasm, but he's saved from having to reply by a tap on the shoulder.

It's Kate. She looks worried, but he has no illusions that it has to do with anything besides Jack. So help him, he likes that she doesn't blink an eye at his insanity, that this damaged version is the only Geoffrey she's ever known.

"I think Ellen's going to kill you if you keep this up," she says.

He relents. Oliver's gone, anyway.

**Kate: Two**

  
Geoffrey's relationship with Darren seems to consist solely of elaborate insults, but that doesn't stop him from lurking in the back of their rehearsals when he thinks no one notices. She can't help watching him.

It's different than with the others: she never saw Oliver on stage, after all, and Ellen's place in her memories has been worn away by dream after dream in which a teenaged Kate took her place. This is Geoffrey Tennant, though, first and last name together like a celebrity you don't know, come to larger-than-life after years in her imagination. She feels far more star-struck around him than she does around Jack. After all, Jack was her tired neighbor on a bus before he was a movie star, and Geoffrey was Hamlet before he was a man who skulked around looking like Darren Nichols gave him a toothache.

"Ms. McNab," Darren calls, right on cue. "I understand that it is difficult to concentrate when one is worried that our resident psychopath may at any moment suffer a dangerous relapse, but the rest of us are somehow persevering."

She turns away, blushing, and tells herself that she's not disappointed when Geoffrey doesn't jump to her defense.

**Geoffrey: Three**

  
She's muttering III.I when he looks in on her before the dress. It's a physical scene, lots of grabbing and shoving, and she has to do most of the work while looking like the victim.

"Stage left on 'are you honest,'" he corrects after a minute. She freezes.

"Shit."

She looks so panicked that he takes Hamlet's grasp on her wrist and walks through the rest of it with her.

It's his own damn blocking, but somehow when she stares up at him—"Indeed my lord, you made me believe so"—he doesn't realize what's about to happen until they're kissing. She gets her fingers in his hair and he clings to her and god, this play is under his skin, in his blood where he will never be rid of it because all he can think is _Ophelia_, sane and whole and full of life under his hands.

It takes them too long to pull away. "You should not have believed me," is heavy on his tongue but he chokes it back; he knows this play, knows that to continue is to end in disaster.

Someone knocks- fifteen minute call- and for one dizzying moment he's sure it's Oliver.

**Kate: Three**

  
"I'm sorry to just throw you into this," Geoffrey says. "I know you sat in on Claire's table work, but the less said about Darren the better, and we've got no time to- anyway." He runs a hand through his hair, turns away, turns back. "If it's any consolation, I don't think you can be anything but an improvement."

She's anxious at first, thinking of the entire cast just waiting to pass judgment the second she opens her mouth. They run all her scenes back to back. By II.I she's forgotten her nerves entirely, lost in the lines she recited in every room of her childhood home and never before on a stage.

Afterward he sends everyone else away, cups her face (tiny bolt of heat lightning to the pit of her stomach- his hands are so big, and god, she spent seven years imagining his embrace), looks straight at her, and says: "Thank you. Thank you, thank you, _thank you_."

"You're welcome," she says, a little giddy. He lets her go and sags back against the edge of the stage, losing both the energy and the harried air he carries through rehearsals.

"Still. Table work tomorrow. Is early okay?"

**Geoffrey: Two**

  
He makes it a point to avoid speaking Hamlet's lines. Not his greatest directorial moment, to be sure, but it's a small enough sacrifice to make for his sanity.

Sadly, it doesn't keep the rest of the play from being a damn minefield. He finally loses patience with the third attempt to get the grave scene on its feet, tilts his face to the ceiling, and yells,

"For God's sake, STOP!"

There is an extremely tense silence.

"Let's get this out in the open, shall we?" he says. "This is it, the scene that knocked the screws loose. Fortunately for you, that was many years ago and the people whose job it is to do that sort of thing have since declared me fit for society. _Un_fortunately for you, the audience who will be seeing this play in a matter of weeks doesn't care about any of that. I promise to warn you if I feel that pesky urge to jump into graves creeping up again, but until then will you all please _concentrate?_"

"Oh, bravo," says Oliver, "very reassuring."

"Shut up," Geoffrey groans, dropping his head into his hands. It doesn't really make his supposed sanity any more convincing.

**Kate: Four**

  
The building is quiet and orderly at this hour, more office than theater. Anna, engrossed in the copy machine, stops to hedge a bit as Kate walks by.

"I'm going to see Geoffrey," she says. "It's scheduled."

"Ah, yes, fine," says Anna. "It's just…he isn't, ah, having one of his…best mornings?" Her eyes are wide, that conspiratorial kind of Geoffrey's-talking-to-the-air-again-but-let's-not-say-that-outright-shall-we look that everyone uses.

"Okay," says Kate, and goes in.

She catches Geoffrey mid-argument with no one and waits as he slowly turns, lowering his arms to his sides. When he gets all the way around he makes a visible effort to crook one of his saner half-smiles. It doesn't particularly succeed.

"Ah, the fair Ophelia," he greets her, and she can't help getting a little thrill when he says the name. "You may save my Hamlet yet."

"No pressure," she says, startled, before she thinks better of it.

Geoffrey thumps down in his seat with an incredulous, slightly hysterical laugh. "No pressure," he repeats. "Falsest words ever spoken about this damned play."

He makes damned two syllables, dramatic and scornful, but when he looks at her again the mischief is back in his eyes and she breathes out, relieved.

**Geoffrey: One (the beginning)**

  
Geoffrey believes that there is a love story in Hamlet.

In the first production he'd ever gone to he'd been disappointed not to see it, and he remained disappointed until New Burbage. Even then it hadn't been part of the original vision, just a result of the way Geoffrey and Ellen couldn't be suppressed and Oliver smart enough to know he was looking at something that worked, even if he hadn't planned it.

Geoffrey plans it. He fills the nunnery scene with longing, takes the embrace that he and Ellen had done- his one conscious echo of that production- and makes it a kiss. At Ophelia's grave he stops everything dead (_earn your pauses_, cautions Oliver, for once just a memory and not a ghost). He wants the audience to see Hamlet absorb the news, see him grieve, see him understand that his quest for vengeance has finally cost him everything he cared about in the world and he wasn't even there.

The way he sees it, Hamlet and Ophelia are just a man and a woman who might have had a love story if not for the uncontrollable obstacles of the outside world.

Not like that's an accessible theme.

**Kate: Five (the epilogue)**

  
She loses track of New Burbage, mostly. After the tabloids move on to more interesting prey she imagines that New Burbage loses track of her, too. She does well: people recognize her on occasion and she doesn't want for work, but she's certainly not famous enough to be a hometown hero. She wouldn't have pegged Geoffrey as good at keeping up his acquaintances, either, but despite it all she is sitting here holding a "Congratulations on not actually getting married" card.

She remembers waiting outside the stage door for his autograph. She'd lost her nerve at the last minute, embarrassed and angry at being embarrassed, snapping at her parents when they urged her on. In the end she'd hesitated too long, because once Ellen emerged from her dressing room Geoffrey saw no one else.

Anyone who'd been there that night could have predicted their marriage, though probably not the years of estrangement and animosity between then and now. Certainly no one would have predicted that the breathless twelve-year-old girl watching them would end up in California, that the signature in her hands would be just _Geoffrey_, no last name, a personal and familiar scrawl.

Strange, the way things work out.


End file.
